Corona semester at the faculty

An unusual lecture period lies behind us. Not only have the daily routines of each of us been turned upside down, but our infrastructure in the faculty has also suddenly had to meet different challenges. In the winter semester, we heard students and staff complaining about how slow the Wi-Fi was in some lecture blocks. This summer semester everything is different. This can be seen, for example, in the network statistics from the Man-da connection at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.

In the 'Yearly Graph', the requests in the winter semester (from October) can be observed during normal teaching hours. You can see how the outgoing traffic (blue line) is significantly higher than the incoming traffic (green area) on a daily basis. In comparison, the normal base load can be clearly seen in August and September. The lockdown was then implemented by the state government at the beginning of April. Incoming and outgoing traffic without teaching and without employees is the same. During this time, our IT faculty (IT Services) set up the big blue button environment with interested and motivated colleagues. Its impact can be seen from mid-April to almost mid-July. Incomming traffic (green area) peaked at 361.6 Mb/s at times and was therefore more than twice as high as outgoing traffic. This will probably have been the first time in the history of the university that more data was transferred from the university network to the Internet than information was transferred from the Internet to the university network.

Our thanks go to our extended IT service team, which enabled us to master this extraordinary semester with a data protection-compliant tool. Thank you very much!!!